Hello to everybody and especially to Jorge Coelho,

I have been using the winstep dock since I was more or less forced to switch to win11 in January. I used win10, which was great, but new laptops was the spark for a new more modern experience. But win11 was bugged, less efficient and boring for a 2026 OS.

In the end...it was an opportunity to discover Winstep (say thx to win11 in the end ) and now I was happy to pay for the Nexus version to get both the dock and the shelves to keep my desktop clean and organised.

Using it everyday for 6 months, I have though observed two annoying behaviours that I wanted to report for a future improvement. (it will be a little long, forgive me in advance)

1)If you set the shelves to a transparent colour and use the "grid menu", folders/files tend to overlap each other, so that everything becomes an unreadable mess. See the pictures.



I have two possible solutions in mind (by order of preference):
-An option to force an opaque grid menu or separate the transparency possibility between the shelf and the related grid menu.
-An option to offset the grid menu opening outside of the shelf area.

2)I am using three monitors: 2x24"and my laptop daily via a usb TB5 dock. They have different resolutions.
In this config, one 24 in the primary display inside windows.
I have a dock on the primary display which I duplicate on the other displays.
Same for one shelf that I duplicate. So basically, the layout is the same on each monitor. 3 docks and 3 shelves in total.
so far..this config is saved in winstep and works.

But if I undock my laptop...the primary display switch to the built-in screen. And here we have several cases I have observed: usually, everything works and I get one dock and one shelf only. But the shelf lost the size and position I defined in the 3 monitors setup because it keeps the resolution and position from the 24"primary display.
Sometimes, for unknown reason, I could get 3 docks and 3 shelves..all in overlap. It happes usually if I restart the laptop while not being docked.



In the first case, if I revert back to the 3-monitors setup...it is ok and it reverts to the initial setup. But if I change the size and position on the buil-in only setup..then the initial setup is fucked up and I have to change it again.

All in all, multi-monitors works but only if the setup does not change the order of monitors.

As a solution, I think the setup/profile for each monitor should be linked to the monitor ID and nothing else. So if the monitor is enabled..you get on the monitor what you setup in the profile of this specific monitor. And if disabled, it should be disabled.
So instead of 1 profile for all the monitors in one setup => 1 profile for each monitor ID

I hope I was clear. In any case, let's discuss this.

Daniel Vitanza

Hi Daniel,

Just a quick reply for now regarding point 2 about the multi-monitor profiles, I will provide a more detailed answer later:

My guess is that you are still running v26.6, right?

A lot of work was invested in fixing and hardening the multi-monitor profiles and appbar (reserve screen space) code in the upcoming v26.8 (which was not easy because changes happen in real time and there are a ton of racing conditions). At this point multi-monitor handling seems to be rock solid, so please download the beta of v26.8 from

viewtopic.php?p=51217#p51217

and please let me know if that has fixed the issues with the multiple monitors.

Waouw That was a very quick answer !

I have installed the beta and I will test it. I'll keep you informed.
Thx already for the support

I confirm, the second issue for the multi-monitors is solved !

This was the most annoying one for day-to-day. Thx

For info, I have tried:

-2 monitors
-3 monitors
-1 monitor

and switching from one setup to another one and vice-versa. Always correct until now.

Yay! Thanks for the feedback.

Getting this right has been very difficult. Even when waking from sleep, Windows does not turn on all monitors at once - they wake up one by one, and each event causes a ton of Display Configuration Changed messages to be broadcast. So you can still be in the middle of processing one when another one arrives, for instance...

As if that wasn't complicated enough, the actions the software takes to adjust to the new configuration may themselves generate additional Windows configuration-change messages, which the software must then react to, and so on...

To make matters worse, if you are running Xtreme, NextSTART is also doing the same thing, and Xtreme must make sure that the NextSTART taskbar is ALWAYS below (or closer to the screen edge than) any shelf, even though both are reserving screen space which Windows assigns on a "first come, first served" basis.



Apologies, I meant to reply to this one in more detail and ended up forgetting all about it.

From Windows Vista up until Windows 10, it was possible to blur the background of irregularly shaped regions via an API call.

The Winstep software scanned the background bitmap of a dock or shelf for semi-transparent regions matching certain criteria, created a "map" of those regions in memory, and passed that map to the Windows DWM. From then on, the DWM automatically blurred only those regions against the window's background while the rest of the window remained normal.

This was perfect, because blurring the background solved precisely the type of readability issues you are describing here.

Windows 10 removed that capability, and Windows 11 never brought it back. The Windows backdrop system now only supports full-window blurring, not individual or irregular regions within a window.

Grid Stacks in docks or regular Shelf tabs are "permanent" and therefore have their own persistent individual settings, including transparency. They normally use the global Shelf theme, although each of these Grid Stacks can also be customized to use their own individual theme.

However, Grid Stacks created "on-the-fly" from folder shortcuts (i.e. folders set to open as Grid Stacks) do not have persistent settings because they are temporary and only exist while that Grid Stack is open. In that case, they inherit their settings from the parent Shelf, including the transparency level.

These two facts together create the problem you are describing.

A setting to open the Grid Stack outside the parent Shelf would not really solve it either, because the parent Shelf itself can be expanded to cover the entire screen.

The best solution would therefore be your first suggestion: adding a setting to make ALL temporary Grid Stacks fully opaque.

There is another potential solution, although I am not sure yet how feasible it would be, or even whether it would be worth implementing: creating a set of settings that applies to ALL temporary Grid Stacks - much like the current Grid Stack Properties panel, but without the Content tab and with the settings shared by every temporary Grid Stack.

Then, in the Tab Properties dialog, right next to "Open folders as Grid Stacks", there could be a choice between:

Inherit parent Shelf settings
or
Use shared Temporary Grid Stack settings

If the latter is selected, a button would provide access to the Temporary Grid Stack Properties dialog.